Milk can't wait for a thaw

Their minister told teachers to take time off because of the cold, but farmers and the workers who service and supply them don't have that luxury. The dairy cows still produce milk, young animals are still being born, despite the temperatures, and all animals still need to be fed, so there's no such thing as time off on the farm. Dairy farmer Cyril Drury of Ardmone, Mountain Lodge supplies Lakeland with the 40 cows that are "calved and milking" he told The Anglo-Celt in his snow-covered farmyard last Friday afternoon. "Water is the biggest problem, we have two tanks on the tractor and I'm drawing water to the animals on the out-farms," said Cyril. He has 300 animals - 100 dairy cows, including the 40 that are producing winter milk. "The milking parlour is frozen every morning. You have to make sure to drain it out completely at night. I have hot water in the dairy [to defrost the pipes] but I have to get up a half an hour earlier every morning." The driver that makes it through the myriad back roads and lanes to the Drury farm and dozens of others every week is Michael Collins from Lakeland, Tullyduff, Bailieboro. Lately he has been out every day of the week at the wheel of his Lakeland Dairies tanker. If it we'd been having regular winter weather "it should be four days a week, but now it's seven days a week trying to catch up and keep everyone happy". Michael and his colleagues make it to all the farmers on their books every second or third day: "We have to keep up to date," he puts it, though the weather makes it hard to meet that target. "We should be getting to about 30 houses a day but it's down to 12, and we're doing about 10 hours a day, from bright to dark." So how does he manoeuvre a 40-foot tanker through narrow roads and twisty lanes that are covered with ice and snow? "Some of the farmers have gritted the roads and I carry salt and grit on the lorry," said Michael. "In fairness to the farmers they know what it takes. You have to ring them as well and get them ready, not to have tractors in the way… if you come down there [indicating a steep slope into Cyril's farmyard] and it's icy… "You have to come into the yard and have a look before you drive the lorry in." Lakeland dairy advisor Tom Downes said the main problem is that collecting the milk takes so much longer, though they're lucky it's a relatively slack time of the year and a lot of farmers are dry (30-35%, he estimates). Delivering feed and collecting milk was taking two or three times as long during the freeze, but no milk was being left in yards or tanks and their 30 tankers were going constantly. "We're lucky the farmers are co-operating well, gritting with sand or quarry grit and scraping snow off their yards," said Tom. "It's great that Michael is fit to get around to lift the milk. "We appreciate the efforts the drivers are making and the co-operation of farmers - even towing lorries in and out of yards." Speaking last Friday afternoon (January 10), Tom, Cyril and Michael agreed with forecasts that said the cold weather could last another 10 days. The weekend brought a thaw in most parts of the county, but the roads were nearly as bad thanks to slush and melting snow and ice. • Cyril Drury uses a Keenan diet feeder on his farm to dispense straw, brewers grain, Cyprus pulp, barley and wheat to his cows. "They're no good if they're not fed," he says. How does he think the dairy sector will perform in 2010? "If the weather was better you could put up with the bad prices - I don't remember it as cold for as long, though 1947 was bad, my father said."